Saturday, March 15, 2014

Maybe It's Not The Patriarchy After All

The college majors that tend to lead to the most profitable
professions are also the stingiest about awarding A’s. Science
departments grade, on a four-point scale, an average of 0.4 points lower
than humanities departments, according to a 2010 analysis
of national grading data by Stuart Rojstaczer and Christopher Healy.
And two new research studies suggest that women might be abandoning
these lucrative disciplines precisely because they’re terrified of
getting B’s.

Goldin
looked at how grades awarded in an introductory economics class
affected the chance that a student would ultimately major in the
subject. She found that the likelihood a woman would major in economics
dropped steadily as her grade fell: Women who received a B in Econ 101,
for example, were about half as likely as women who received A’s to
stick with the discipline. The same discouragement gradient didn’t exist
for men. Of Econ 101 students, men who received A’s were about equally
as likely as men who received B’s to concentrate in the dismal science.

Another research project, led by Peter Arcidiacono
at Duke University, is finding similar trends in science, technology, engineering and mathematics...

“Maybe women just don’t want to get things wrong,” Goldin
hypothesized. “They don’t want to walk around being a B-minus student in
something. They want to find something they can be an A student in.
They want something where the professor will pat them on the back and
say ‘You’re doing so well!’ ”

“Guys,” she added, “don’t seem to give two damns.”

Why are we still concerning ourselves with women, college, and their degrees? What is this, the 1960's? The world's changed a bit, and if there's any trouble out there, the trouble is that not enough men are attending universities anymore, and this will have profound social impacts. The trouble starts well before college level, with boys having significantly more problems, both academic and social, in our K-12 schools. Everyone knows this but it's not really politically correct to discuss it. Rather than worry about that we'll worry about why women don't want to major in economics. For some reason it's easier to hand-wring about that.